Following the ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, Crikey looks at the great political euphemisms of history.
After Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company SpaceX’s Starship rocket celebrated 4/20 by “blazing” itself into smoking ruins shortly after launch last week, the company reached for an interesting phrase. The process the rocket had undergone was not “exploding” but, apparently, “rapid unscheduled disassembly” — apparently a common enough saying in these circles, but one which got us thinking.
Anyone who is regularly called on to justify catastrophic failures, be it in the corporate or political world, will have to do this — fall back on euphemism, or what George Orwell called phrases intended to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them”. Here are a few great examples of euphemisms throughout history.
‘Economical with the truth’
This is a favourite of the British political class, with weird regularity, during politically charged legal cases while under examination from high-profile Australian lawyers. Before he was prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull made his name in the mid-1980s defending the Australian publisher of Spycatcher, the memoirs of a former MI5 agent, against British government action attempting to prevent its publication. This led to the following exchange involving then-UK cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong:
Read more about history’s greatest euphemisms.
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